District CIO

The Norwin School Board is moving forward with a capital campaign and forming a fundraising steering committee to create a STEM center at its high school. The district also will develop financial projections for the center.

Stories of mismanaged 1-to-1 computing initiatives in schools are filling the news — and unsurprisingly so in many cases. But there are plenty of good “edtech” stories worth highlighting. In almost every case, the schools that are getting it right are focused on the problem they are trying to solve and designing an instructional model first.

Tech projects are a great opportunity to encourage students to learn how to work with others. At the end of the day, incorporating a digital curriculum is not about teaching students to use a particular device or piece of software. It’s about developing the skills necessary for them to be successful.

The new Business Technology Early College High School in Queens, New York is a collaboration between SAP, Queensborough Community College, the New York City Department of Education, and the Early College Initiative at the City University of New York. Although the first two years are focused on literacy and critical thinking, students then need to choose a business or technology major and have real-world internships.

edX launched a new initiative with 26 new courses aimed at high school students, who make up 5 percent of edX's users. Courses were developed by 14 institutions, including MIT, Rice, the University of California Berkeley, Georgetown and public high schools.

The Circle the Schools initiative uses an adopt-a-school model to connect San Francisco-based technology companies with local public schools. Over the course of the school year, each partner company works with principals and teachers to organize volunteer activities tailored to meet each school’s individual needs.

CyberPatriot is all about protecting U.S. interests, and the heroes are teams of high school students. The bad guys (imaginary, in this case) are hackers who would try to disrupt power grids, banking, health care, transportation systems and other vital services.

Instead of quizzes and tests that interrupt classroom activity, many districts and testing companies are working on ways to integrate formative assessments into daily instruction and use technology to gather real-time feedback on student progress. Among the solutions schools have found are “stealth assessments” hidden in video games and student roundtables that work like college dissertation defenses.

A new bounty of academic data is guiding teachers as they adjust instruction in the hopes of boosting student achievement. Some districts are connecting “data coaches” with the teachers’ own professional learning communities to ensure this bounty of information fulfills its pedagogical promise.